Increasing your lean muscle mass can help speed up your body's fat-burning ability and could be your key to permanent weight loss. Evidence continues to accumulate on the benefits of adding some type of resistance or strength training to your workouts. With benefits that spread across the health spectrum, researchers now believe strength training can play a vital role in long-term weight loss.

Miriam Nelson, author of Strong Women Stay Slim (Bantam Books) and a researcher at Tufts University in the US, found that women who followed a weight-loss diet combined with weight-training exercises lost 44 per cent more fat than women who only followed the diet. "Researchers have discovered something disturbing: when women diet, at least 25 to 30 per cent of the weight they shed isn't fat, but water, muscle, bone and other lean tissue," Nelson says. But strength training can help us to lose excess fat rather than vital tissue.